Saturday, April 13, 2013

Guest Post: Protecting the Vulnerable

Protecting the Vulnerable

Twenty years ago, HHS protected vulnerable populations—children, prisoners, mentally disabled/enfeebled, and women. Though much has been made of “war on women,” “women in binders,” and providing abortion pills to children without parental knowledge in the name of freedom for the fairer sex, the mentally disabled or demented are increasingly having their rights to healthcare stripped from them in the name of efficacy and cost savings.

Say you are over 65. You fall and break your hip. Depending on your means and your ability to appear in possession of your faculties, you may receive surgical assistance. However, if you are elderly with dementia, your ability to appreciate the outcome and benefit from it (subscript: Be of benefit to the community/society), is considered nil or poor.

Why spend money to assist someone with their injury when ignoring it and giving them a pain pill and sending them to a nursing home bedridden with a sling or splint, condemned to a wheelchair or bed, to be overmedicated and hopefully, to die shortly without having to lie in their urine and feces too long, is much more cost effective?

If dementia is in your diagnoses, you are SOL. There may not be obvious “death houses” or “gas showers” or “ovens” yet, but the medical decision making has changed so that the aged are no longer treasured as sources of culture, history and love, to be nurtured and appreciated, to be listened to for their life experiences. In the gimme-now generation, they are spent, discards, their batteries run down, to be tossed. Who knows? Maybe they will begin to be recycled for the Green movement… But they are currently seen as a lose/lose, not to be bothered with, and the medical oaths no longer apply, except to proffer Big Pharma solutions to drug to oblivion until the body gives in to the inevitable death. (This not even being done in UK.)

Within recent months, doctors and nurses began noting “Psychiatric History” on triage reports and performing “suicide assessments” when interviewing every patient. All of this is becoming part of the new Obamacare electronic medical records and fed to the government. Why the sudden interest in annotating psychiatric background? To cull? Be careful what you say, not to cry, get upset, curse….it is being noted and reported somewhere. Oh, that sounds paranoid….

On the other hand, addicts—those disabled because of drug habits and alcohol consumption—continue to have “favored nation status” in government programs and healthcare processes. Found down? Fine. Someone will call 911 or EMS and you can have a bed in ICU to help with that heart attack you gave yourself with the cocaine. Liver failing from those 2 6-packs you drank daily over the weekend for the past 10 years? Fine. You’ll get state of the art lab work and electrolyte balancing and counseling for a least a few minutes and put back on your feet.

If you work in a private facility, you may be pulled and drug/alcohol tested at any point in time and possibly lose a job. However, Florida Governor Scott’s attempt to ask those receiving disability payments to be drug/alcohol tested caused the ACLU to rise up in affront and bring a case in which the final judgment was that those getting the government dole would have their constitutional rights violated if asked to urinate in a cup. How can there be no violation of rights for those with jobs but a violation for those taking taxpayer money for a living?

The federal and state governments have become enablers, paying without consequence those who continue their self-destructive habits of illegal drugs (despite some states decriminalizing Cannabis) and alcohol. But the ACLU wants to ensure that this continues. These people end up in the healthcare system, costing money—often do not have health insurance—and they get care. Crime is increased because when they run out of money for their habits, they will do whatever they need to do to get more money for more pot, crack, crank, meth, coke, benzos, you name it. Rob, steal, home invasion, car jacking….and murder. Why not stop the drug usage? Oh, you’d have to look at the open borders, the distributions networks set up through all the major cities that feed to Mexico and who is laundering what for whom. Perhaps it is in the government’s interest to keep the addicted addicted.

1 comment:

Whoever the author is, he or she is right on the money. Even as far back as 1963, the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports estimated that 2/3 to 3/4 of all violent crime in the US was linked to drugs, a lot of that committed by addicts who needed money to buy drugs.